Transform your home into a solar EV charging station

Our Aurora, Colo. house on which we installed a 5.5 kW solar system in 2010, and sold in late 2015, is still sporting a clean, sharp and working solar system nine years later. It is saving the current house owners about $1,000 every year.

You can use home solar as your own personal EV charging station, or “gas” station.

Solar driving — or solar-charged driving — is about putting solar panels on a rooftop — a home rooftop, a garage rooftop, a warehouse rooftop, a shopping mall rooftop, or a solar carport rooftop (a solar carport is a carport with solar panels that produce electricity that an EV can then use to charge its batteries), plugging in your EV, charging the batteries, and driving away at normal speeds, in everyday traffic, with everyone else!

What counts as running your car on sun?
In terms of plugging your car in, one might ask, what if you plug your EV or PHEV in at night, when the sun isn’t shining, is your car really running off sun? Technically, no.

If over the course of a year — a year is the easiest way to conceive of this question — the solar panels on your house produce enough kilowatt hours (kWh) to power both your total home electric use and the miles you put on your EV, then it is fair to say that you are, annually speaking, running your car on sun!

However, if you plug your car in during a long June summer day, the technical answer could be yes (depending on how much electricity your home is drawing and how much the panels are generating at that time) — your EV’s batteries are being directly charged by solar-generated energy, possibly by solar energy alone!

While we at SolarChargedDriving.Com don’t want to oversimplify solar-charged driving, we do want to show the world that it is possible, that it is do-able, that it is practical, and that it can be — and we believe, should be — done by as many Americans, and people, around the world as possible.

About The Author

Christof Demont-Heinrich is founder, creator and editor of SolarChargedDriving.Com, which he launched in September 2009. A journalism professor at the University of Denver (DU), Demont-Heinrich is a lifelong environmentalist who loves to bird, hike, camp, and bike. As passionate as he is about the environment -- and about promoting the synergy between solar power and electric cars, he is equally passionate about writing.